One of the tricky things about running a TV show is that you just never know how good the guest stars you cast on a weekly basis, how good they’re going to be in the episode. Sometimes they surprise you in good ways and sometimes they surprise you in disappointing ways.
Something that’s very important is to preserve the sense of surprise, the sense of discovery. The eye of the person you are talking to, your shadow on the ground. It’s important not to get suffocated by all the things in life and lose that sense of surprise.
The audience today has heard every joke. They know every plot. They know where you’re going before you even start. That’s a tough audience to surprise, and a tough audience to write for. It’s much more competitive now, because the audience is so much more – I want to say ‘sophisticated.’
Confidence, to me, is just pushing yourself a little bit further than you think you can go, and you’ll always surprise yourself.
It may surprise people to know that I advocate the reform of the United Nations, not its abolishment.
As human beings, we are addicted to novelty. Part of being stylish is surprisingness. Part of being an artist is surprisingness. If there are ingredients of beauty, it certainly is one of them. Surprise is like a spice on the meal, it makes you say: ‘woo’.
I did a double CD, ‘The Element of Surprise,’ in 1998. That album went gold.
When I first redesigned the ‘Surfer’ magazine, a magazine about magazines took a copy to the famous American designer Milton Glaser, and – surprise surprise – he hated it.
The biggest lesson that I’ve learned is that fashion is this tightrope where you have to be consistent but inconsistent. You need the connective thread but at the same time you need a sense of surprise.
One day I looked at something in myself that I had been avoiding because it was too painful. Yet once I did, I had an unexpected surprise. Rather than self-hatred, I was flooded with compassion for myself because I realized the pain necessary to develop that coping mechanism to begin with.
The initial attraction of a political convention was that often the outcome was not preordained. There was at least some element of surprise. But, now it’s like tuning in to a movie where you already know the plot and the ending. It’s just not that interesting.
I guess the biggest surprise I got going to Iran was that the Iranians really liked me as an American.
To my great surprise, Twitter is not housed in a silver pod that orbits Earth at supersonic speeds, vacuuming up and then dispersing digital bits of worldwide chitchat; it’s in a big, bland office building in downtown San Francisco, near a bowling alley and an Old Navy.
Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!
Generally, Hollywood makes the same stories over and over. I’ve never wanted to do the same thing twice. If a script doesn’t surprise me in some way, I simply can’t commit to the project.
Labels and classifications of any type are not law, nor are they written in stone. It’s up to us to be aware of this and confront it and break through it by doing things that shock and surprise people because they thought we could never achieve at that level.
What I always got excited about with ‘Arrested Development’ was the element of surprise.
My divorce came to me as a complete surprise. That’s what happens when you haven’t been home in eighteen years.
I’m not a big planner. Things always sort of surprise me.
‘Get Out,’ of course, is the surprise hit movie that Peele wrote and directed about a black man named Chris, who discovers that his white girlfriend’s family is running a nasty racist conspiracy.
I want to do something that people have not seen before… surprise everyone. There has to be variety in work.
I think a lot of politicians, rightfully so, understand that their political futures are tied to how many times people see their names in print. The press is so accustomed to politicians wanting those things, it’s a surprise when somebody’s like, ‘Whatever, I’m not really worried about those things.’
I often do things that surprise me, not to mention others.
I had read the novel and I had heard David Lean was going to direct it – and it came as a surprise to me because American actors, if given the chance, can do style as well as anybody and speak as well as anybody.
I always wanted to be a character actor rather than the poster boy that they tried to make me 100 years ago. An actor has a degree of responsibility to change for the audience, to give them something new each time, to surprise and not bore them.
To my surprise, the more I searched about Qi Xiangfu, the more I found of a life lived partly online. He once wrote a short memoir in which he described himself in the third person, with the formality usually reserved for China’s most famous writers.
I’ve known Bezos for decades, since the very early days of Amazon, so it’s no surprise to me that he’s smart or willing to make big bets.
When people learn that I’m a qualified primary school teacher, I’m often met with surprise and a list of questions, including, ‘How do the children react? How do you do it?’ Children are some of the most open and inclusive individuals. It’s often us adults who have difficulties in accepting difference.
We want to satisfy our fans, but we want to surprise them, too. That’s our challenge.
I can be a lady – surprise!
I think it’s important for artists to work together. It’s great for fans to see, like, Ludacris came out to our show in Atlanta and kinda made a surprise appearance there, it shows a mutual respect for what each other does.
A study last year showed that the page you turn to first in the newspaper can be a predictor of how long you will live. No surprise, turning first to the Comics Pages prolongs your life.
I always try to put myself in the way of surprise as much as possible. My ambition is to keep challenging myself. I like that journey of discovery.
Trudeau’s obsession with China should not come as a surprise. For decades, many Canadian corporate and financial insiders were espousing deeper and closer ties with China at all costs.
Every time I collaborate with an artist, I want to surprise fans. I want to do something new.
The biggest threat to a better life is the desire to keep the future under control – to make the world predictable by reining in creativity and enterprise. Progress as a neat blueprint, with no deviations and no surprise, may work in children’s cartoons or utopian novels. But it’s just a fantasy.
I’ve always liked New York, as I like towns with an edge and New York has a European feel, so when I came to play music here in the ’80s it was a surprise to me.
Is it a surprise that into the vessel, in which the mercury has no inclination and no repugnance, not even the slightest, to being there, it should enter and should rise in a column high enough to make equilibrium with the weight of the external air which forces it up?
My favorite magazine is the ‘Harvard Business Review.’ If someone sat across from me in a restaurant and didn’t know me, that might surprise them.
The wild Indian power of escaping observation, even where there is little or no cover to hide in, was probably slowly acquired in hard hunting and fighting lessons while trying to approach game, take enemies by surprise, or get safely away when compelled to retreat.
One of the difficult things of making a horror sequel in general is because the horror genre is so founded on surprise.
It’s always a pleasant experience while acting because I like to surprise myself and the audience with what I do.
I grew up on movie sets, so it was something I just found familiar. When I was growing up also, in high school, I would audition for things and my parents let me audition for things – with the thought that I wouldn’t get them. And then I would get them… sometimes, and it would surprise them.
Spirit of place! It is for this we travel, to surprise its subtlety; and where it is a strong and dominant angel, that place, seen once, abides entire in the memory with all its own accidents, its habits, its breath, its name.
ISIS despises the Russian government for its support of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, and so it’s no surprise that ISIS began targeting Russia in 2015, around the same time that Russia first intervened in the Syrian civil war.
I’m sure it came as no surprise to my friends and family when I became an illustrator and then a writer because, from about the age of five, I was one of those children who always had his nose in a book.
Think of your favorite teacher you ever had in school: the one who made it the most fun to go to class. They surprise you. They keep you guessing. They keep you coming back, wanting to know what’s going to happen next.
It’s amazing how, in New York, there is almost a feeling of entitlement by the public – this very palpable lack of surprise at being stopped in the street and being asked to be the subject of a 12-foot monumental painting.
The abolition of the presidential term limit and President Xi Jinping’s concentration of power have come as an unwelcome surprise to many.
Clearly, those of us women who play football wish that there was more coverage. But it’s one of those things that happens. Every year the level is getting higher, and I think we surprise a lot of people when the world focuses its attention on the World Cup or the Olympics final.
